Interpreting success. Integration and school success of Intercultura's foreign students in Italy
2010
Alberto Fornasari, Francesco Schino, Maria Chiara Spotti, Ilaria Di Vincenzo
University of Bari, University of Milan - Cattolica
Intercultura was the first educational organization to bring students from all over the world to Italian secondary schools: since 1958 several thousands of young people aged 16-17 years have attended an entire school year in Italy. This has given rise to cultural and emotional ties with our country.
The possibility of including in our secondary schools young people who had never studied our language and had a school curriculum "incompatible" with the Italian one seemed to most people a utopia. Yet the utopia has lasted for 53 years and was taken as a model by the European institutions when they wanted to experiment a similar project of intra-European exchanges.
The Intercultura Foundation wanted to deepen the knowledge of the mechanisms that facilitate or slow down the inclusion of a foreign teenager in our school system and asked two university teachers (Fornasari and Spotti) to study this phenomenon in two sample regions: Emilia-Romagna and Puglia. The research aims to help overcome the image of the foreign pupil as a problem, weighing down and slowing down the work of the class, highlighting the positive experiences of teaching/learning and the "good practices".
Publications
Trimestrale Intercultura N° 61
A shourt abstract in English is available on this page.
Conferences and presentations
Florence, 12 November 2011